Tickets are already selling out for round two of the disastrous event that went viral and landed its founder in jail. Who’s surprised, when we’re obsessed with both scammers and notoriety?
August 24, 2023 1:29 pm(Updated 1:52 pm)
They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, and nobody knows this better than Billy McFarland. The disgraced young businessman-cum-con-artist, who served four years for fraud in US federal jail between 2018 and 2022, has, on his release, returned to the project that put him there in the first place; he actually decided it was a good idea during his seven months in solitary confinement. That’s right: it’s Fyre Festival, round two.
You may well speculate on what kind of person would attempt this. Is McFarland trying to prove himself and save his reputation, putting on the event of a lifetime? Is he simply rolling up his scammy little sleeves, cackling with maniacal laughter as he attempts to defraud investors of another $30m? One suspects it’s a little bit of both. The more mysterious question, though, is why anyone would want to go.
In case you need a refresher: Fyre Festival was a disastrous event that McFarland attempted to stage in 2017 in the Bahamas. Tickets that cost between $500 and $12,000 were marketed to influencers via aspirational videos of McFarland on a boat surrounded by models – including Bella Hadid and Kendall Jenner – and his business partner, the rapper Ja Rule. It was billed as the experience of a lifetime – beats, beaches, babes; more Instagram opps than you could conceive of in your wildest dreams.
But when ticketholders arrived, there was, essentially, nothing there: no acts (Major Lazer, Blink-182 and Pusha T had all dropped out once the preparation for the festival started to go wrong); no food (viral photos circulated online of slices of plastic cheese on a single piece of white bread); no shelter (the structures that were supposed to house festival goers were not built; instead, they used disaster relief tents that barely stayed together); and no water (in a famous clip from the ensuing 2019 Netflix documentary, Fyre, one of McFarland’s colleagues revealed that McFarland had told him to perform oral sex on somebody in order to get more bottled water).
And yet despite all of this – despite the fact that the phrase “Fyre Festival” is now used interchangeably with “clusterf**k” – tickets are selling apace. Or at least, in classic McFarland style, it certainly seems that way: the “first round” of cheapest tickets – which cost $499 – have sold out, but there are only 100 of them (on Instagram, McFarland wrote “The first FYRE Festival II drop has sold out”, as though this release was equivalent to the Glastonbury presale). In any case, I have no doubt that the rest of the tickets will sell out, too, despite the fact that it will obviously be a total wipeout.
Fyre Festival is a lot better known this time around, what with all the cheese sandwiches, blowjobs and brazen fraud. (Beyond a lot of hungry, pissed-off influencers, the more serious effect was on the local Bahamians whom McFarland employed to construct his festival and whose businesses he relied on to bail him out: at the end of the event, he couldn’t pay them, and they were left ruined.) The absurdity of its first iteration is enough to draw many people with money to burn – for curiosity, banter or both.
But notoriety isn’t the only reason people will go. This round of Fyre Festival is being sold on exactly the same premise as the first. It’s vibes, it’s potential, it’s status: it’s not about going to the festival, but being the sort of person who went.
This is an event that would not even have been conceived of if it weren’t for social media and people’s insatiable appetite for self-realisation online. There was no substance to his idea, it was just something for beautiful people in a beautiful place. But the egregious lack of specificity made it all the more appealing to people who have learned to care more about how something looks than what something actually is. Before it became clear that Fyre wasn’t all it was made out to be, ticket-buyers wanted to go simply so they could take pictures to put on Instagram, and prove that they were at the most exclusive event of the year.
Ironically, they were – just not in the way they’d hoped. And this second round of ticket-buyers have the same hope, but for different reasons. Very few people are naïve enough to think this will make them look beautiful and exclusive. This time it’s about irony and the glamour of “experience”. I expect nobody buying a ticket cares whether or not it’s a disaster – the worse the experience, the better the story.
Eighteen months out of jail, McFarland is raring to go. In the Netflix documentary, it was clear he has the sort of aggressively delusional, grandiose and narcissistic outlook that makes him think he’s capable of anything; that nothing can stand in his way. Is it only this that kept him going – or is there a stroke of business genius in there, too? Either way, one thing’s for sure: this time, when it all blows up, the joke is on the punters.
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